Way back in the early years of the internet, the only way to get porn was through the web, newsgroups, and sometimes via bulletin board systems. Porn was somewhat limited to pictures and not much videos because it was difficult then to upload files bigger than 10 megabytes with limited bandwidth. With the recent popularity of Flash — a technology that allows users to interact with websites and producing eye-popping animations — the ubiquitousness of file sharing applications, and the availability of broadband, porn sites have been popping up like mushrooms all over the internet.
What’s disturbing is that some of these “daring” chatters look like minors
Now, thanks to broadband, you can now download porn to your heart’s content. You also don’t need to download the movie before you can watch it on your PC or your LCD screen. All you need is to visit their site and the movie is played instantly. Examples of these sites are PornoTube, a clone of the popular video site, YouTube. PornoTube offers on demand Flash videos of user uploaded pornography, including video, audio and photographs. The site has also social features like rating, commenting, etc. All videos are tagged and can be browsed via a tag cloud or by straight or gay content. There are RSS feeds for various categories. Videos can also be embedded into other sites.
Celebrity victims
This technology has also allowed a lot of celebrity scandals to proliferate because it’s so easy to upload videos anonymously. A lot of Filipino celebrities have been victims of these sex video scandals. The most recent Pinay celebrities that were victims of video sex scandals were Katrina Halili and Maricar Reyes. If you look for the keyword “pinay sex scandal,” you’ll be surprised with what you’d find.
The video advantage
Recently, some instant messaging applications like Yahoo! Messenger have incorporated video into their systems allowing two more people watch a common video source, a webcam for example. This enabled people to not only talk to each other but also to see what each person is doing. This idea gave birth to applications like CamFrog.
Video chatting the CamFrog way
CamFrog not only allows you to do one-on-one video chat but it also allows you to broadcast the video from your webcam to a community. These communities or channels can easily be created by downloading a server software from CamFrog and installing it on your PC. The PC is of course connected to the internet, usually via DSL. The channels are then registered to a centralized directory where users can find them and then provides them an option to join that channel. Bigger channels (more than 10 simultaneous users) are usually hosted on dedicated servers that have better connection to the internet.
A screen capture of a typical adult-oriented channel in CamFrog
Some of these chatters are often persuaded to remove their clothing and reveal their private parts by the “DJ” or by the channel operator. The DJ has the “power” to remove someone from the channel and also provides entertainment by providing music that are seemingly of a different genre than what some people are used to.
Parents need to be aware of what their children are doing, both online and offline.
What’s disturbing is that some of these “daring” chatters look like minors. These chatters often perform acts that can be considered as more than sexually suggestive. In one instance, I was able to witness a threesome between two males and a female. When chatters asked how old the girl was, one of the male performers replied “15 yo” (15 years old).
Conclusion
The proliferation of notebooks with built-in webcams, the accessibility and the relatively cheap price of webcams, and parents who are oblivious of what they’re children are doing online are ingredients of more serious things to come. These technologies and communities allow pedophiles and sexual offenders to hide in the cloud of anonymity and enable them to prey on the innocent. Parents need to be aware of what their children are doing, both online and offline. They need to install software and devices that would limit what their children can do online and make them aware that they are monitoring them. This is part of responsible parenthood.
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